Where does it come from?

Within The Judge, the comic is then credited to a different magazine - the Wisconsin Octopus, published at the University of Wisconsin between 1919 and 1959.

By looking through the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries, we were able to view a few early editions of the Wisconsin Octopus magazine, and found this is not the first time the 'Expectations vs. Reality'-format joke appeared in print.

In an edition published in either 1919 or 1920, the following comic (which is very dated by today's standards) can be found:

Image copyrightWisconsin Octopus

What is a meme?

The word meme was coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene

Dawkins called memes "ideas that spread from brain to brain"

The Oxford English Dictionary defines memes as images, videos or text that are copied and spread by internet users, often with variations

Is it 'the first meme'?

According to the definition, a single image cannot be a meme. It has to be copied and spread with variations to the original image.

So on its own, the 1921 comic is not a meme. But coupled with the comic from either 1919 or 1920, it begins to fit the definition, as the two comics are variations on the same style - using two panels and captions to set-up an expectation and contrast it with reality.

While we can't say with certainty that this is the first meme by that definition, we can say that because it was copied and spread with variations this cartoon was genuinely part of a pre-internet 'Expectations vs. Reality' meme.

Clearly the writers of the Wisconsin Octopus magazine were ahead of their time.